Generally, gas cooktop appliances include a plurality of gas burners mounted to a top surface of the appliance. During use of the cooktop, spills and overflows can lead to food particles accumulating on the top surface of the cooktop. Such food particles can collect beneath the gas burners and be difficult to clean.
Gas cooking appliance users frequently cite difficulty cleaning beneath the gas burners as a complaint about modern cooktops. However, cleaning below gas burners on modern cooktops is difficult for a variety of reasons. For example, gas burners that are fastened to the cooktops generally include cracks at assembly interfaces that tend to accumulate food particles. As another example, gas burners that are removable from the cooktops by a user of the cooktop for cleaning generally include holes, supporting geometry and fasteners that are difficult to clean around. In addition, gas burners positioned coincident to top surfaces of associated cooktops inherently heat the top surfaces of the cooktops. The hot top surface of the cooktop can burn food particles, and burnt food particles on the cooktop can be particularly difficult to clean.
Accordingly, a cooktop appliance with features for facilitating cleaning below a burner of the cooktop appliance would be useful. In addition, a cooktop appliance with features for limiting heat transfer from a burner of the cooktop appliance to a top panel of the cooktop appliance would be useful.
In addition, certain cooktop appliances include multi-ring gas burners. Such burners can include a center burner surrounded by one or more concentric burner rings. Certain multi-ring gas burners ignite gaseous fuel, such as propane or natural gas, at one of the burner rings and utilize carryover ducts along the top surface of one of the burner rings to carry flames and ignite gaseous fuel at other burner rings.
Generally, carryover ducts suffer from certain problems. For example, fuel within the carryover duct can burn at an opening of the carryover duct rather than within the duct when a fuel and air mixture within the carryover duct is imbalanced. Thus, flames at one of the burner rings may not be transferred to other burner rings through the carryover duct if the fuel and air mixture within the carryover duct is imbalanced. However, forming a suitable fuel to air ratio within the carryover duct over a wide range of flow rates for the gas burner can be difficult. In addition, carryover ducts generally rely upon fuel collecting at a top of the carryover duct. At a top of the carryover duct, flame quenching is problematic, and copious amounts of fuel may be needed to overcome such quenching. However, large volumes of fuel may limit entrainment of air within the carryover duct such that an undesirably large flame is produced when the fuel within the carryover duct eventually ignites.
Accordingly, a multi-ring gas burner with features for reliably transferring flames between burners of the multi-ring gas burner at a variety of flow rates would also be useful.